Thursday, May 09, 2013

David Hirst - Are the vagaries of history working toward the birth of an independent Kurdistan?

I happened to notice an unusually provocative piece that David Hirst, a veteran Middle East journalist for the Guardian, wrote in January of this year. Hirst has always been sympathetic to the Kurds and their aspirations, even in times when that sympathy was very unfashionable in 'progressive' circles. But he also has a record of hard-headed analysis, and whether or not the prospect of an independent Kurdistan actually turns out to be plausible in the foreseeable future, the question he poses in the article below is not simply, or necessarily, a matter of wishful thinking or idle speculation:

So are the Iraqi Kurds now on the brink of their third, perhaps final,
breakthrough, and the great losers of [the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the post-World War I settlement] about to become, 90
years on, the great winners of the Arab spring?

Whether or not they might actually lead to "the birth of an independent Kurdish state" is another question. Developments in Iraq could just as easily lead to "an ethnic war between Arabs and Kurds". The big wild card right now is that the government of Turkey, which always fought tooth and nail against even the slightest possibility of autonomy for Iraqi Kurdistan, seems to be shifting its position due to regional geopolitics. But how far are they really willing to go? From the perspective of Turkey's AK government, autonomy for the Iraqi Kurds might be just barely tolerable, despite possibly unsettling implications for Turkey's own Kurdish problem, if the alternative is to strengthen a Baghdad government that is Shiite-dominated and allied with Iran. But full-blown independence? I am skeptical. Still, history is full of surprises.

Here's the heart of Hirst's piece:

[T]he "Kurdish question" has now reached another critical stage, and it is intimately bound up with the region-wide cataclysm that is the Arab spring.

It was ever thus for the Kurds, their destiny as a people shaped less by their own
struggles than by the vagaries of regional and international politics,
particularly the great Middle Eastern upheavals they periodically
produce. These began, in modern times, with the first world war and the
fall of the Ottoman empire. In the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement Britain and France promised them a state of their own, but then reneged, and they ended up as minorities, more or less severely repressed, in the four countries – Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria – among which their vast domains were divided.

They repeatedly rebelled against this new order, especially in Iraq. But their landlocked location and the wider geopolitical environment were always against them. Their rebellions were always crushed – the last one, under Saddam, with the genocidal use of gas.

But they never ceased to dream of independent statehood. And the first of two great breakthroughs in the road towards an independent Kurdish state grew out of the megalomaniac folly of Saddam himself, with his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and one of its entirely unforeseeable consequences, the establishment of the internationally protected "safe haven" in northern Iraq.

The second breakthrough grew out of the new constitutional order ushered in by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Under it, the Kurds consolidated their autonomy with broad new legislative powers, control of their own armed forces, and some authority over that mainstay of the Iraqi economy: oil. [JW: Contrary to some widespread mythology, this was definitely not an outcome welcomed by the US government and its regional allies, who preferred a unified and re-centralized Iraq.]

[....] So are the Iraqi Kurds now on the brink of their third, perhaps final, breakthrough, and the great losers of Sykes-Picot about to become, 90 years on, the great winners of the Arab spring?

It seems that they await one last thing – another of those game-changing events, such as the break-up of Syria – that can transform the whole geopolitical environment in the Kurds' favour. But the quarter in which they are actively looking to bring it about is Turkey. That they should even think of this is, historically speaking, extraordinary. Turkey probably has most to lose from independence-seeking Kurdish nationalism, and has been brutal as any in its repression of it. Ever afraid of Kurdish gains in another country as a progenitor of them in Turkey, it has long set great store on Iraq remaining a united country.

But since 2008, in a complete reversal of earlier policy, which had once been to boycott Kurdistan altogether, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been pursuing "full economic integration" with it. Meanwhile its relations with the Iraqi government have been deteriorating, with the two now on opposite sides in the great Middle Eastern power struggle that pits Shia Iran, Maliki's Iraq, Bashar al-Assad's Syria and Hezbollah against the Syrian revolutionaries, most Sunni Arab states and Turkey itself. Turkey's courtship with Iraqi Kurds has moved so far, the Kurds believe, that Turkey might soon break with Maliki's essentially Shia regime and deal separately with the other main components of a fragmenting Iraqi state, its Arab Sunnis and its Kurds.

In return, an independent Kurdistan could be a source of abundant and reliable oil supplies, a stable ally and buffer against a hostile Iraq and Iran, and even, in a policy option as extraordinary as Turkey's own, a collaborator in containing or combating fellow Kurds in the shape of the PKK – who, having established a strong presence in "liberated" Syrian Kurdistan, are seeking to turn it into a platform for a reviving insurgency in Turkey itself. [....]

And then some speculation follows that does sound a little like wishful thinking (along with bits from the first few paragraphs of the piece) . But read the whole thing.

I was surprised to read an article in the Baghdad newspaper al-Sabah,
by its editor Abd al-Jabbar Shabbout, suggesting it was time to settle
the "age-old problem" between Iraq's Arabs and Kurds by establishing a
"Kurdish state". I had never heard a formerly so heretical view
expressed in any Arab quarter so publicly. And this was no ordinary
quarter: al-Sabah is the mouthpiece of the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki himself. Shabbout went on to suggest a negotiated "ending of the Arab-Kurdish partnership in a peaceful way".

He
called his proposal plan B, plan A being what was already in train:
that is, a continuous dialogue between central government and the
Kurdish regional government conducted within the framework of the "new
Iraq" which emerged after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

But plan A,
he said, was getting nowhere. Differences – over power and authority,
oil and natural resources, territory and borders – were so deep that the
dialogue had repeatedly failed. And in recent weeks it almost came to
war instead. For a while the Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga faced each other across the frontiers between Kurdistan and the rest of
Iraq in an atmosphere so tense, said Shabbout, that hostilities could
have broken out at any moment. And it wasn't only Shabbout but Maliki
himself who warned that if war did break out, it wouldn't be just a war
between Kurdish rebels and a dictatorial regime in Baghdad, as it used
to be under Saddam, but an "ethnic war between Arabs and Kurds".

Be
it plan A or plan B – war or diplomacy – the latest, dangerous
stand-off has made one thing clear: the "Kurdish question" has now
reached another critical stage, and it is intimately bound up with the
region-wide cataclysm that is the Arab spring.

It was ever thus
for the Kurds, their destiny as a people shaped less by their own
struggles than by the vagaries of regional and international politics,
particularly the great Middle Eastern upheavals they periodically
produce. These began, in modern times, with the first world war and the
fall of the Ottoman empire. In the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement Britain and France promised them a state of their own, but then
reneged, and they ended up as minorities, more or less severely
repressed, in the four countries – Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria – among
which their vast domains were divided.

They repeatedly rebelled
against this new order, especially in Iraq. But their landlocked
location and the wider geopolitical environment were always against
them. Their rebellions were always crushed – the last one, under Saddam,
with the genocidal use of gas.

But
they never ceased to dream of independent statehood. And the first of
two great breakthroughs in the road towards an independent Kurdish state
grew out of the megalomaniac folly of Saddam himself, with his invasion of Kuwait in 1990,
and one of its entirely unforeseeable consequences, the establishment
of the internationally protected "safe haven" in northern Iraq.

The
second breakthrough grew out of the new constitutional order ushered in
by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Under it, the Kurds
consolidated their autonomy with broad new legislative powers, control
of their own armed forces, and some authority over that mainstay of the
Iraqi economy: oil.

But from the outset they had made it clear
that they would only remain committed to the "new Iraq" if it treated
them as an equal partner. It wasn't long before this ethno-sectarian,
power-sharing democracy began to malfunction, intensifying the Kurds'
yearning for independence. Openly or surreptitiously, they began
accumulating constitutional, political, territorial, economic and
security "facts on the ground", designed to ensure that, if and when
they proclaimed their newborn state, it would have the ability to stand
on its own feet.

So are the Iraqi Kurds now on the brink of their
third, perhaps final, breakthrough, and the great losers of Sykes-Picot
about to become, 90 years on, the great winners of the Arab spring?

It
seems that they await one last thing – another of those game-changing
events, such as the break-up of Syria – that can transform the whole
geopolitical environment in the Kurds' favour. But the quarter in which
they are actively looking to bring it about is Turkey. That they should
even think of this is, historically speaking, extraordinary. Turkey
probably has most to lose from independence-seeking Kurdish nationalism,
and has been brutal as any in its repression of it. Ever afraid of
Kurdish gains in another country as a progenitor of them in Turkey, it
has long set great store on Iraq remaining a united country.

But
since 2008, in a complete reversal of earlier policy, which had once
been to boycott Kurdistan altogether, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been pursuing "full economic integration" with it. Meanwhile its
relations with the Iraqi government have been deteriorating, with the
two now on opposite sides in the great Middle Eastern power struggle
that pits Shia Iran, Maliki's Iraq, Bashar al-Assad's Syria and
Hezbollah against the Syrian revolutionaries, most Sunni Arab states and
Turkey itself. Turkey's courtship with Iraqi Kurds has moved so far,
the Kurds believe, that Turkey might soon break with Maliki's
essentially Shia regime and deal separately with the other main
components of a fragmenting Iraqi state, its Arab Sunnis and its Kurds.

In
return, an independent Kurdistan could be a source of abundant and
reliable oil supplies, a stable ally and buffer against a hostile Iraq
and Iran, and even, in a policy option as extraordinary as Turkey's own,
a collaborator in containing or combating fellow Kurds in the shape of
the PKK – who, having established a strong presence in "liberated"
Syrian Kurdistan, are seeking to turn it into a platform for a reviving
insurgency in Turkey itself.

It is even said that Erdogan has gone
so far as to promise Massoud Barazani, the Iraqi Kurd president, that
Turkey would protect his would-be state in the event of an Iraqi
military onslaught – though presumably that would never come to pass if,
adopting plan B, the Maliki regime really is contemplating the seismic
step of letting the Kurds go of their own free will.

About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and the New School for Social Research, He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2015-2016 and a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)